Top 100

Top 150 Tim O'Brien Quotes (2024 Update)
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Tim O'Brien Quote: “But in a story I can steal her soul.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “The day was cloudy. I passed through towns with familiar last names, through the pine forests and down to the prairie, and then to Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and then home again. I survived, but it’s not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “Laughter does not deny pain. Laughter – like a wail – acknowledges and replies to pain.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “Imagination, like reality, has its limits.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can’t fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can’t make them undead.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not. Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference – a powerful, implacable beauty – and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly. To.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “Everyone acts stupid at some time in order to be loved.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “In some respects, though not many, the waiting was worse than the tunnel itself. Imagination was a killer.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “Courage is nothing to laugh at, not if it is proper courage and exercised by men who know what they do is proper. Proper courage is wise courage. It’s acting wisely, acting wisely when fear would have a man act otherwise. It is the endurance of the soul in spite of fear – wisely.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “Life is never all one thing. It bounces around. Certainly, my own life has.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “I’m young and happy. I’ll never die.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “Why do our politicians put warnings on cigarette packs and not on their own foreheads?”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “And in the end, really, there’s nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe “Oh.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “Inside I feel much like a 12-year-old or a 17-year-old who knows big words.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “Nostalgia – that’s the basic sickness, and I never heard of a doctor who can cure it.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “He wanted to know her. Intimate secrets: Why poetry? Why so sad? Why that grayness in her eyes? Why so alone? Not lonely, just alone – riding her bike across campus or sitting off by herself in the cafeteria – even dancing, she danced alone – and it was the aloneness that filled him with love.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “What they carried was partly a function of rank, partly of field specialty.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “He killed me at the Scrabble board, barely concentrating, and on those occasions when speech was necessary he had a way of compressing large thoughts into small, cryptic packets of language.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “What they carried varied by mission.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “It’s very hard to articulate the things that are important about writing.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “Each morning, despite the unknowns, they made their legs move.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “Stories are for joining the past to the future.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “I hope so. Except I’m afraid to look at myself. Literally. I can’t even look at my own eyes in the mirror, not for long. I’m afraid I won’t be there.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak and not budge until your buddies picked you up and lifted you into the chopper that would roar and dip its nose and carry you off to the world. A mere matter of falling, yet no one ever fell. It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “Fiction, maybe art in general, is a tentative, uncertain enterprise; it’s not science, it’s an exploration, but you never find much in the way of answers.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “I drank some chocolate milk and then lay down on the sofa in my “living” room, not really sad, just floating; trying to imagine what it was to be dead. Nothing much came to me. I remember closing my eyes and whispering her name, trying to make her come back. As we stared at each other, neither of us moving, I felt some... thing go shut in my heart while something else swung open.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “Stories can save us.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “The greater a man’s fear, the greater his potential courage.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive when you’re almost dead.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “Is there sound, he wondered, without reception? Do you hear the shot that gets you? How big, in fact, was the Big Bang? Do our pathetic earthly squeals fall upon deaf ears? Is silence golden or common stone.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “Can a word stop your heart as surely as arsenic?”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “Red and green and silver flares, all colors, and the rain came down in Technicolor.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “Large effects might come from small causes.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “I heard water evaporating. I heard the tick of my own biology.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “Maybe it’s a crackpot theory, but in the aftermath of my sickness, I’ve often wondered if what we call insanity might be a biological response to mankind’s consciousness of its own mortality, a way of unknowing what we know, a defense against the specter of nothingness and foreverness and intolerable finality.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “This book is essentially different from any other that has been published concerning the “late war” or any of its incidents. Those who have had any such experience as the author will see its truthfulness at once, and to all other readers it is commended as a statement of actual things by one who experienced them to the fullest.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “What is love, for God’s sake, if not the most distilled obsession?”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “If inner peace is the true objective, would I win it in exile?”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “But this, too, was a performance.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “I am forever astonished at the longevity of childhood. How it never ends. How we are what we were. How turtles and engines and stolen kisses leave their jet trail across our gaping lives.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “Sun and waves and gentle winds, all love and lightness.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “That’s a true story that never happened.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “They wanted happiness without knowing what it was, or where to look, which made them want it all the more.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “We find truth inside, or not at all.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “The whole world worked by subterfuge and the will to believe.”
Tim O'Brien Quote: “You have taken many risks. You have been brave beyond your wildest expectations. And now it is time for a final act of courage. I urge you: March proudly into your own dream.”
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